Oh I'm sure! His examples usually revolved around his days working on credit card processing systems. But I can't even start to imagine the systems required to handle requests for VISA which can supply the needed response-time and up-time demands.

A hundred million pages per second? Really?

Stop and think about how much traffic you think that Google gets. Don't forget all of the AJAX requests that are sent back and forth, random ads on third party sites (many of whose pages auto-refresh while they are sitting in your browser, each time loading multiple ads), etc.

Let's just say that any semi-reasonable back of the envelope will give you some truly impressive numbers. I don't think that I should say any more than that.

Now consider that this data is constantly being processed to figure out things like click through rates, trending requests, and much, much more. And that data is then fed back into the live site.

The implied transaction rate should be enough to impress the average mainframe user.

Of course Google's scale is impressive but you're talking about datacenters upon datacenters of servers. I always get a chuckle when people talk about "old" mainframes taking up a whole datacenter. Now the Mainframe occupies a corner and the commodity servers take up the datacenter. :P

Facebook allegedly pushes two million images per second.